Das Boot
Episode List
Alaaaarm, with nice graphics.
S01
S01E01
Das setup. Ein very complex piece of interlocking characters inserted into a larger setting of the German war machine, right as their U-Boats are being slaughtered in the Atlantic. As a “pilot”, I found it Sehr gut (OK, I’ll stop, Entschuldigung), very cosmopolitan.
This follows a particular sub crew, but also the French resistance on land.
The captain is a rookie, promoted mainly for being the son of a famous military figure. He thinks of himself as a moral person, but he has just lead to the court martial and subsequent execution of a sailor caught in dereliction of duty. The pressure for results will be high.
His first mate is the classic career official, hyper attuned to the politics and bureaucracy of his duty. Filed away as a completely unreliable person.
After a cockup involving spitting moonshine into live wires, a lowly engineer is shanghaied into the radio operation position. The rest of the crew are jocks and they seem to hate him.
That engineer is apparently pulling double duties for resistance, and his sister replaces him unwittingly. She is an Alsace-born bilingual, therefore perfect for intelligence work. It remains to be seen if she can be a double agent with a Gestapo officer breathing down her neck.
S01E02
Die erste problems. The resistance keeps shrouded on secrecy, while on the sub the captain’s authority is tested.
The captain is pushing the submariners with constant drilling, which might make him unpopular with the crew, and dreaded by the officers, but his charisma makes up for it.
Orders come from the top to abandon formation and go in an undercover mission. This turns out to be some kind of prisoner exchange with Americans? This smells fishy, since the Gestapo man chose the captain directly. He must be feeling like Uriel now.
On land, the Alsatian girl has to interrogate the woman she was supposed to meet, and ask her about the other unknown person she was meeting (herself). The Gestapo seems oblivious since the man in charge is flirting with her.
The resistance catches up with her, and they don’t take no for an answer. Their first assignment is taking morphine (lacking cyanide pills) to the now tortured prisoner she interrogated. The prisoner was so beaten up, our protagonist had herself to administer the lethal injection. As if it wasn’t enough leading some poor woman to her death, she has now to literally kill her.
S01E03
Keine gut deed goes unpunished. Everybody’s motivation are getting clearer now.
The protagonist is advancing rapidly in her position as double agent, and risking a lot. The Gestapo guy has the hots for her, and she intelligently keeps him close, but not too close. She is gaining his trust, and the resistance notices this. They turn out to be pretty ruthless, and again are played by the protagonist by releasing the passports for her morphine delivery service. The radio schematics are still hidden.
The relationship between the protagonist’s brother and the brothel’s waiter is expanded upon. She is an escaped Jewish girl, living incognito in La Rochelle. She met the radio engineer and they have a secret baby. He exfiltrated the radio schematics as payment for the passports, so they could leave to a place where she can use her real name.
All hell breaks loose, though. The resistance bombs a propaganda U-Boot docking parade, where our protagonist is injured, and the Jewish girl gets brutally gang-raped in public for refusing the advances of some drunken private.
At sea, things are improving, slowly. Abandoning their comrades for a prisoner exchange and killing one crew, while leading to two other U-Boat sinks, leaves the crew seething. Particularly for a guy surnamed Greenwood, a clear Juden mark. The officers are even more enraged when they realise he is some kind of war financier and middleman, who laughingly consider Germany as the losers of war already.
Morale is boosted by them sinking their first ship, nudged by the war-hungry first mate. The captain is not too happy, morally and tactically. In the hurrahs, distractions lead to a crew getting his arm amputated on the spot.
S01E04
Das prisoner exchange is started, goes as well as you expect it.
The atmosphere on the sub is thick, and that’s not just the gangrenous effluvia from amputated guy. The captain prepares for the prisoner exchange, continuing not to trust on his first mate. The fact that the last engagement could have been avoided comes out, and the first mate gets chided for that.
The wounded sailor is left on the American ship for medical care, and the German prisoner they are taking back is the captain of a recently sunk sub. The Greenwood guy is not really Jewish, but the first mate is a prick anyway, and he provokes the “Nazi pig” him into throwing overboard. Demotion achieved! He will start conspiring with the new captain for control of the sub.
The Americans are not to be trusted, it seems. Even though they are using military hardware, this is a private mission to rescue the son of a future presidential candidate, who is financing his campaign with Reich bonds. Worse, they are ambushing the Germans and two destroyers are on the way to sink them. Pricks.
On land, things are also bad. The double agent business is going well, but the resistance wants more, now that our protagonist is working closely with the Gestapo.
The gang-rape of the Jewish girl lead to life threatening injuries, she might as well keel over. The baby is nonetheless safe, for now.
The American resistance leader is super cocky and shows herself publicly to apply pressure to our protagonist. This backfires spectacularly since the Gestapo now knows her face, let’s see how is this solved. Even worse now that she is romantically involved with our protagonist.
S01E05
Die post-coital disphoria strikes again. Insert joke about torpedoes here.
After the surprise fuck between a kill-on-sight fugitive Carla Monroe and our protagonist, a literal Gestapo agent now, she hands Carla the keys to the castle, the radio schematic she was saving all this time.
This doesn’t backfire because our protagonist is now deeply trusted by the Gestapo chief, so much she can nudge him to drop her security escort.
The radio schematics are used to summon a higher ranking Resistance guy, who brings news of the world, plus guidelines to take over the “cell”, leaving direct action to the side. Now that Carla is exposed, she doesn’t have much choice to comply. Her big asset is the emotionally compromised protagonist, which feels like an asset with an expiry date.
On water, calamity approaches. Under the cover of a bout of sickness by the captain, the POW they are transporting and the disgraced first mate rebel, take over the boat, meeting almost passivity by the officers and crew. They did seize the MP40…
Right after leaving the real captain stranded with a small lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic, the usurper captain goes nuts and you confirm he has a death wish: attacking a convoy protected by destroyers in broad day light, and then sit and watch the boats burn… What have they done‽
S01E06
Das kaput episode. Scheisse happens.
In the sub, all hell breaks loose. Depth charges are deployed and they go down hard. The usurper captain sits this one out in his bunk, and so does the first mate, but he is remorseful about it.
They start free falling, but luckily they hit a reef and remain at about 250 meters. Mostly from the violence of impacts, they are stranded at the bottom with a ticking time bomb in the form of internal leaks that raise the pressure and CO₂ buildup, due to the batteries being broke.
Fixing the batteries takes several attempts, since water leaks led to HCl gas buildup in the room, which nearly kills everyone who enters there. They are saved by the first mate as some form of redemption, we shall see if he survives.
On land, things go from bad to worse. The baby is getting sick, and the housemate nurse helping him is on the Gestapo kill list.
The resistance is receiving a shipment of weapons, and our Alsatian protagonist has to judo her way out of a rock and a hard place to help them. Her luck is that the Gestapo officer is drooling for her and just wants some poontang, no matter what.
The resistance cell is breached, their hideout raided and many people killed, including the high ranking new guy. Our Alsatian protagonist is saved by the shootout.
Carla meets our protagonist for a misery fuck, but the Gestapo guy also thinks of the same, the result of this love triangle is left for the next episode.
S01E07
Das pre-finale episode. The pieces start falling into place.
Our Gestapo officer is still alive, Carla decides not to take the shot. No deaths so far, only une petit mort.
The resistance is done anyway, and Carla lost her ticket to leave La Rochelle, so she has nothing to lose. They kidnap the Navy captain and want the literal head of Gestapo on a stick. The result is a full on militarisation and enforcement of the approved kill list.
Our Alsatian girl also gets the (fake) news her brother is dead. She decides to cut her loss and send her roommate (and blacklisted person) abroad, saving her and the baby in one swoop. What she misses is that she is compromised now…
On sea, things are not so horrible, but they get there. Without fuel, the sub is unable to reach safety, and without radio they are sitting ducks (and presumed dead even).
They find a Russian boat drifting, and board it, even including the rogue captain in the party.
It seems empty, until they find a skeleton German crew. The engine is kaput, but they have fuel, so a trade is tentatively tried. After concluding the engine is truly dead, the boat crew is strafed, with casualties and they find their true cargo, Jews for Canada.
One of the girls is kept cuffed as cumdumpster, and in her last breath she performs the same duty for a kid on the sub crew, a so called “hooker cheater”. Filled with disgust, the sub torpedoes the ship, so that their sins are taken to the bottom of the sea.
S01E08
Das finale. For now…
The sub finally reaches safe waters, so the focus shifts to avoid being court-martialed for their actions.
They start with the easy part, faking the log book so that it fudges everything after the rendezvous with the Americans. They stick to as close as possible to the truth, so that the crew can get their story straight.
Still, there is always that guy, the thick dumbass who brags about their wild adventures while they are still away from shore. Sensing the Kar98k lining up in the firing squad, his own comrades smother him in his sleep.
They haven’t reached the shore and are already regretting their pact of silence who turned them into animals…
On land, our Alsatian protagonist is fucked. She is not sure the Gestapo dude has proof she is the mole, but she is smart, she keeps away.
On the resistance side, Monroe decides to kill the Navy captain the following day, while the kill-listed people are being rounded up. The protagonist decides to try and stop the bloodshed by anonymously revealing the farm they are holing up in, but the Gestapo guns them down anyway, and executes part of the kill list as payback. Monroe is no more…
The Alsatian girl is now at a crossroads. She sends the baby away with her roommate (they make it to Marseille), but there’s not much else for her to do. She goes back to the office, where the Gestapo officer leads her to Monroe’s body, putting her square under his thumb.
As a petty control freak, he attempts to rape her after revealing Monroe was her true love, but he gets a knife in the dick. Which only turns him into a blood knight from now on.
Our Alsatian protagonist is now a broken person, joining her brother, back from a sub mission that left him equally doubting humanity.
Finally, as a very interesting stinger, our original sub captain Hoffman appears out of the blue in America, visiting the Greenwood fellow at his sumptuous office.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.